The thirsty crow

A short story for listening and reading practice

Hello everyone!

Have you heard of Aesop’s Fables? These are short stories which teach us useful life lessons. The most famous one is about a hare and a tortoise who have a race. The hare is so confident he will win that he stops for a rest and falls asleep so the tortoise wins! I expect a lot of you will know this story.

Today I’m going to tell you another one of Aesop’s stories that’s less well known. I’m going to write the story in my own words and then I’ll record it for you as well so you can practise your listening.

There are a few different things you could do with this lesson:

• Listen to the recording and see how much you can understand, then perhaps listen to it again if you need to. You might understand more the second time.

• Listen to one sentence at a time and repeat it to practise your pronunciation.

• Listen and read the text at the same time. This helps you to match the spelling with the pronunciation.

• Listen to the story one sentence at a time and try to write down what you hear, then check your text with mine. This will show you where you have problems that you need to work on.

Here’s some vocabulary you need to know to understand the story. You can see a lot of these things in the picture.

• crow = a large black bird

• thirsty = needing a drink

• jug = a container with a handle which we pour drinks from

• stone = a small rock

• beak = the mouth of a bird

Are you ready? Here’s the story!

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The Thirsty Crow

Click here to listen:

Once there was a crow and he was so thirsty that he thought he might die of thirst. He really needed to find some water to drink soon. After looking for a while, he found a jug which had some water in the bottom. However, the opening of the jug was too small for him and he couldn’t reach the water no matter how hard he tried.

Then he had an idea. There were some small stones near the jug so he started to pick the stones up with his beak and drop them into the jug. Patiently, he added more and more stones and the water level gradually rose higher. Eventually, the level of the water was high enough for him to reach and he was able to have a long cool drink.

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So what do you think this story means? I found a few different answers online. One possible meaning is that difficult and urgent situations cause us to find clever ideas and solutions. Or necessity is the mother of invention, as a famous proverb says.

Another possible meaning is that cleverness is better than force. If the crow had knocked the jug over, maybe the water would have spilled out and been lost. In some versions of the story, the crow tries to knock the jug over but it’s too heavy.

One more suggested meaning is that you will reach your goal in the end if you keep going step by step, just like the crow had to keep adding one stone after the other. This is a good lesson for language learners! When English seems difficult, just keep going step by step and don’t give up!

I hope you enjoyed the story! Let me know in the comments if you would like more posts like this.

Katie

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Thanks for reading! I’m Katie Salter and I teach British English online. I help adult learners to speak better English through conversation practice and grammar lessons.

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